Games quality control teams on the rise amid layoffs

Quality Assurance (QA) has always seemed like a group of people looking for flaws in the game to try to break it or generate bugs, i.e. people who are playing video games all day long. Sometimes caricatured as we saw in Mythic Quest. Although it may make you a little envious, it's not the best way to play games all the time, because of the demands of looking for those glitches and errors. Right now these employees are a key part of the industry and in the context of constant studio layoffs, QA teams have not diminished, some have even increased their demand for professionals.

During Gdańsk's DevGAMM at AmberExpo, Gamereactor's special envoy was able to talk to Gabby Llanillo, QA Lead at Krafton/PUBG Studios who was able to work on Valorant and The Last of Us: Part II. She told us that companies are making more effort to strengthen QA teams before development begins, which contrasts with the mainstream conception that they are the last in the production process. " QA is still largely seen as replaceable, all games need QA and you can always hire based on what you need," Gabby said.

It seems that studios are becoming more and more conscious of having good QA in order to get their products out in the best possible way for their players and it seems to be a positive trend. "I think very skilled, experienced QA and also QA teams or managers that need to build out a team. Yeah, those are getting a little bit more wanted nowadays because more teams want to build secure teams in terms of testing that have really good foundations instead of just throwing on a QA team for a few months at the end of the project and then getting rid of all of them,"</em> Gabby concluded.

We see how this sector has changed in the last few years and it seems to be one of the big gaps in the industry for anyone who wants to be part of the creation of a video game, with real possibilities of promotion to the design department, as discussed later in the video. We leave you the whole interview with local subtitles below.